What to do with Marina

My sister is a gift-giver. She loves receiving and giving gifts. She gets so excited about it sometimes that she gives away part of the surprise because she just can’t hold it in. I love my sister.

She told me recently that she was mailing me a book. At first she kind of had to give it away because I’m moving and she didn’t know if I’d want it sent to my current residence or if she should just wait and send it after I’ve moved. Well, I said I want it now, please! :p You can’t tell me you’ve got a surprise for me and then expect me to wait longer than I have to before receiving it!

This time, I believe she bought the book at a Friends of the Library sale, or something similar. I don’t know all the details, and they don’t really matter too much. She didn’t pay full price, which is good — because when the book arrived earlier this week, it was in Spanish. Which is great, except I can’t read Spanish.

She didn’t realize it was in Spanish until I told her. Which is sad, but also charming.

She saw the author’s name, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, remembered that I’d liked the two books I’d recently read by him (neither of which had the same title as this one), and bought it for me. The book? Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, one of his untranslated (into English, anyway) young adult novels. I really wish I could read it.

Now the part I need your help with. What should I do with this book that I can’t read?

Ideas that have been tossed around:
• Save it. Keep it on my shelf, regardless of the fact that I can’t read it.
• Learn Spanish so I can read it.
• Give it away here on the blog to someone who will at least review it in English for me.
• List it on BookMooch.

13 responses to “What to do with Marina”

I know quite a few people who can read Spanish well enough to enjoy it; I’ve got a couple friends who have advanced degrees in Spanish and Spanish literature. I’m not sure they would enjoy Ruiz Zafón; I don’t know what kind of books they read. And, none of these friends live close to me. I’ll keep thinking about this option, though!

You can give it away to friends who read Spanish, donate it to your library so they can use it in their collection, or for one of their sales, swap it with another friend who can read Spanish, host a giveaway (though I have no idea how many of us can read Spanish). . . Good luck!

That absolutely sucks! Unless you really see yourself trying to learn Spanish so you can read this book, I say you might as well give it away. If you can’t enjoy it, then maybe someone else can. I think you should probably go with the blog giveaway first. That way, like you said, at least maybe you’ll at least get an English review out of it. If you don’t get any takers on the blog giveaway (which you could advertise on Twitter), then you can go the Bookmooch rout. You should definitely be able to find someone on there to take it.

Still, sorry to hear about this! Hopefully, plans are in the works to translate this into English soon. I’d read it!

Did you ask your sister what she thought you should do? If it were me, I probably would keep it until I was able to get an English-translated version. Kind of like a souvenir. And just because I love Zafon, too. After all, it’s just one book and doesn’t take up much space :-). Then maybe I would give the Spanish language version away once I had the English version. I think eventually all his works will end up being translated, since his visibility is increasing!

I’m in agreement with those who said to donate it to the library. Native Spanish speakers in our country *tend* to be in lower income brackets, which need libraries the most. Sadly, many libraries lack foreign language books to serve the populations of non-English speakers (Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, etc).